The Kitchen and Amant Present CFG-20260717, July 17, 2026, 7–10pm

In conjunction with the exhibition CFGNY Puddles into Pond at Amant (March 19–August 16, 2026), CFG-20260717 is a performance co-commissioned by The Kitchen and Amant, presented as part of The Kitchen’s Without Walls program on Friday, July 17, 2026, 7–10pm at 316 Ten Eyck. The project activates 316 Ten Eyck, Amant’s dynamic 12,500-square-foot open-air lot, neighboring its galleries and campus. The performance begins at 8:00pm followed by a block party culminating the evening from with DJ Bobby Beethoven. The program is free with RSVP.

CFGNY is a collaboration between artists Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, and Tin Nguyen. Established in 2016, the collective has developed a research-driven practice across fashion, painting, ceramics, photography, and installation that examines Asian diasporic histories through what the artists describe as “vaguely Asian” aesthetics, mobilizing strategies of stylization and replication to complicate ideas of origin, authorship, and value. CFGNY treats identity as mutable, stylized, and performative, foregrounding the conditions under which it becomes legible while remaining strangely abstracted, unstable, or resistant to fixed interpretation. Approaching identity and subjectivity as relational endeavors, CFGNY displaces singular narratives of place and history and conceives its art-making—integrally collaborative within and beyond the collective—as an act of sociality.

The exhibition, Puddles into Pond, at Amant, takes its conceptual point of departure from the No Name Painting Association (无名画会 Wuming Huahui), an amorphous group of artists active in Beijing starting in 1969. Their practice represented not only an aesthetic refusal, but a subversive reconfiguration of collectivity away from the centralized planning of institutional sanction. CFGNY considers this legacy as a framework for thinking about collective practice under conditions of constraint, where the exhibition as a whole considers how collectivity is formed and sustained under regimes that seek to measure, monetize, and regulate time, bodies, and expression. A pop-up store transforming Amant’s gallery reception area invites the audience to wear and acquire garments from CFGNY’s capsule collection throughout the duration of the exhibition. Published by Amant, a forthcoming monograph of CFGNY’s practice spanning the past ten years will be released in Fall 2026.

The performance CFG-20260717 builds upon the group’s multi-year research engagement in The Kitchen’s institutional archive. The artists explore how the development and circulation of emerging video technologies from Asia, specifically the Sony Portapak in Japan, the first one-person operated, self- contained video camera and playback unit introduced in 1967, enabled the artistic pursuits that sustained The Kitchen’s founding in 1971. This is the history of the emergence of video art in New York City; a period of creative experimentation that marked a shift in the physical and emotional relationship between the body, the gaze, the screen, and the archival record, concurrent to the artist communities that grew out of the medium’s accessibility.

At Amant’s 316 Ten Eyck outdoor venue, CFGNY synthesizes this history through performance and fashion (using both interchangeably) and examine it within an inter-connected dialogue of race, value, labor, and exchange, reconfiguring established narratives of the “avant-garde.” CFG-20260717 debuts the artists’ fifth presentation of fashion—a new collection of garments produced in situ with tailors in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. In collaboration with stylist and frequent collaborator Avena Gallagher, CFGNY stages over thirty looks on an ensemble of performers sited within a sculptural set constructed with materials recurrent in their practice, such as wooden 2x4’s and translucent plastic. The scaffolded structure is inset with numerous LED monitors displaying alternating video feeds captured via a choreography of cameras wielded by the artists and performers, together taking form as a glowing light box in the middle of the parking lot that nods to the “site” of accelerated image transmission.

CFGNY initiates the live work through the form of lecture–performance, a strategy that extends research, study, and image-making into discursive sociality. The performance evolves and unravels into a theatrical environment of scenography and movement direction by artist Elliot Reed, punctuated by artists and musicians LYDO and __Drew McDowall__’s sound design, dramaturgy by Cynthia Leung, and lighting design by Sarai Frazier. Casting is a community-building fixture of CFGNY’s performances—some figures are life-long childhood friends (Chinchakriya Un), others are artists and interlocutors with whom they have sustained long-term collaborations (Sung Tieu, Stewart Uoo, Lumi Tan, Cole Lu, Cici Wu, Diane Severin Nguyen and Paul Pfeiffer), in addition to other individuals who have intersected both with CFGNY and The Kitchen’s storied legacy of video, music, performance, and dance.

CFG-20260717 is co-commissioned by The Kitchen and Amant and organized by Angelique Rosales Salgado, Assistant Curator, The Kitchen, and Tobi Maier, Chief Curator, Amant.

Production by Stuart Lorimer, Director of Operations, Joseph Euoi Lee, Production and Public Programs Associate, Tom Forkin, Production and Technical Coordinator, Amant, David Riley, Production & Exhibitions Manager, Tassja Walker, Production Supervisor, The Kitchen, and William Morgan IV, Styling Coordinator, CFGNY.

About CFGNY

CFGNY is a collaboration between artists Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, and Tin Nguyen. CFGNY is an artist collective whose research-based practice takes the form of image making, installation, sculpture, garment making, and performance to expand ideas of racialization and subjectivity. Founded in 2016, the collective continually returns to the term “vaguely Asian”: an understanding of racial identity as a specific cultural experience that includes being perceived as other. Recent and upcoming exhibitions, performances and projects include the 82nd Whitney Biennial, New York (2026); Contemporary Art Gallery, Vancouver (2025); Cooper Hewitt Smithsonian Design Museum, New York (2024); Hammer Museum, Los Angeles (2024); Sculpture Center, New York (2023); PIN-UP/Marséll, Milan (2023); Japan Society, New York (2022); X Museum, Beijing (2021); RISD Museum, Providence (2019); and Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam (2018). In October 2024, CFGNY was named Frieze London’s Focus Stand Prize winner for its presentation with Hot Wheels, Athens and London. CFGNY is currently composed of Daniel Chew, Ten Izu, and Tin Nguyen.

Website: www.cfgny.us

Instagram: @cfgny2

About The Kitchen

Founded in 1971 as an artist-driven collective, The Kitchen today reaffirms and expands upon its originating vision as a dynamic cultural institution that centers artists, prioritizes people, and puts process first. Programming in a kunsthalle model that brings together live performances, exhibition making, and public programming under one roof, The Kitchen empowers its audiences and communities to think creatively and radically about what it means to shape a multivalent and sustainable future in art. The Kitchen seeks to cultivate and hold space for wild thought, risky play, and innovative and experimental making, encouraging artists and cultural workers alike to defy boundaries and sending them into the world to remake art history and catalyze creative change.

Among the artists who have presented significant work at The Kitchen are Muhal Richard Abrams, Laurie Anderson, ANOHNI, Robert Ashley, Charles Atlas, Kevin Beasley, Beastie Boys, Gretchen Bender, Dara Birnbaum, Anthony Braxton, John Cage, Lucinda Childs, Julius Eastman, Philip Glass, Leslie Hewitt, Darius Jones, Joan Jonas, Bill T. Jones, Devin Kenny, Barbara Kruger, Simone Leigh, Ralph Lemon, George Lewis, Robert Longo, Robert Mapplethorpe, Sarah Michelson, Tere O’Connor, Okwui Okpokwasili, Nam June Paik, Charlemagne Palestine, Sondra Perry, Vernon Reid, Arthur Russell, Cindy Sherman, Laurie Spiegel, Talking Heads, Greg Tate, Cecil Taylor, Urban Bush Women, Danh Vō, Lawrence Weiner, Anicka Yi, and many more.

The Kitchen Without Walls is a programming initiative that explores site, cross-institutional collaboration, and the potentials of institutional porousness as its Chelsea building is under renovation and the organization operates from its satellite space at Westbeth Artists Housing.

Website: thekitchen.org

Instagram: @TheKitchen_NYC

The Kitchen’s Funding Credits

The Kitchen’s programs are made possible in part with support from The Kitchen’s Board of Directors, The Kitchen Global Council, Leadership Fund, and the Director’s Council, as well as through generous support from The Amphion Foundation, Inc., Bloomberg Philanthropies, The Cowles Charitable Trust, Joseph and Joan Cullman Foundation for the Arts, The Helen Frankenthaler Foundation, Howard Gilman Foundation, The Harkness Foundation for Dance, Marta Heflin Foundation, Jerome Robbins Foundation, Lambent Foundation Fund, a fund of Tides Foundation, The Lotos Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, The New England Foundation for the Arts, The New York Community Trust, The Ruth Foundation for the Arts, The Fan Fox and Leslie R. Samuels Foundation, and in part by public funds from the Manhattan Borough President, the National Endowment for the Arts, New York City Department of Cultural Affairs in partnership with the City Council and New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

The Kitchen acknowledges the generous support provided by the Collaborative Arts Network New York (CANNY). As a coalition of small to mid-sized multidisciplinary arts organizations, CANNY is committed to strengthening the infrastructure of arts nonprofits throughout New York.

About Amant

Amant is a center for contemporary art located in Brooklyn, NY. Founded by art collector and philanthropist Lonti Ebers in 2019, Amant is a non-collecting institution that fosters artistic research, experimentation, and dialogue through exhibitions, live programs, publications, and artist residencies in Brooklyn, NY; Siena, Italy; and José Ignacio, Uruguay. The core of Amant’s mission is to advance the presentation of contemporary art with an emphasis on innovative formats and ideas. Free and open to all, our 31,000-square-foot, five-building campus includes a multipurpose screening and performance space, a café, bookshop, and restaurant. We support both established and mid-career international and local artists who work across diverse creative fields. We are committed to building cultural partnerships with like-minded organizations in the U.S. and abroad while activating new and ongoing conversations with our local communities.

Among the artists who have exhibited at Amant are Grada Kilomba, Gala Porras-Kim, Sung Tieu, Shilpa Gupta, Patricia L. Boyd, Sky Hopinka, Liliane Lijn, Nour Mobarak, Senga Nengudi, Ser Serpas, Shanzhai Lyric, Dena Yago, Joshua Serafin, Dietmar Busse, Loretta Fahrenholz, Jenna Bliss, Hanne Darboven, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, General Idea, Jef Geys, Mike Kelley, Marc Kokopeli, Brad Kronz, Ghislaine Leung, Paul McCarthy, Carissa Rodriguez, Ilene Segalove, Sable Elyse Smith, Stefan Tcherepnin, Esben Weile Kjær, Barnett Cohen, Layton Lachman, Women’s History Museum, Mimosa Echard, Lu Yang, Christelle Oyiri, CFGNY, Kim Gordon and many more.

Past artists in residency have included Goldin+Senneby, Emilija Škarnulytė, Shamica Ruddock, Eduardo Navarro, Himali Singh Soin, Display Distribute, Selma Selman, Iris Touliatou, Tomas De Luca, Sabelo Mlangeni, Mauro Cequeira, Aristotelis Nikolas Mochloulis, Rosa-Johan Uddoh, Chantel Foo, IM Youngzoo, Ruth Angel Edwards & Chloee Maugile, Marcus Pal, Ana Pi, Reliable Copy, Ufuoma Essi, Maha Maamoun, Domenick Ammirati, Jennifer Krasinski, Na Kim, Johanna Unzueta and many more.

Amant Foundation USA is a non-profit 501c(3) organization.

316 Ten Eyck is Amant’s outdoor venue for performances, exhibitions, and special projects.

Press contacts:

press@amant.org and Dan Duray dan@nothingobstacle.com ; Gilberto Rosa-Duran, gilberto@thekitchen.org and Gregory Werbowsky, gregory.werbowsky@purplepr.com and thekitchen@purple.com.